Review – Our Exodus, M.M. Silver, Wayne State University Press Detroit, 2010

“It was said that Exodus had done more for the popularity of the Zionist idea than 50 years of Zionist propaganda.” This reflection by a Jewish leader on Leon Uris’s best-selling novel, Exodus, realised the dream of its author, an American Jew, and high-school dropout.

Silver forensically explores Uris’s troubled family life, experiences in the US marines, and casual relationship with Judaism, that shaped his muscular view of Israeli success that established the modern state of Israel in 1948.

Uris willingly embraced Israel’s invitation to write an account of Jewish success that

Silver, a Jewish historian, describes in Our Exodus as ahistorical. Uris, frustrated by 2000 years of Jewish weakness, culminating in six million Jews marching to their death in the Holocaust, constructs his own ‘idealised Israeli’.

Uris by embellishing and ignoring significant historical events, creates a powerful new breed, victorious, that miraculously reclaims Jewish ancestral land,

Silver contends the result is an Americanisation of Israel’s founding story, where Uris brushes the canvas with ‘romanticism’ and ‘cowboy’ images – he did write the script for the 1957 movie ‘Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.’! The subsequent movie by Otto Preminger reinforces this view, but also hints at a possible co-existence, contained in Paul Newman’s final words, absent from Uris’s purpose.

In his final chapter, ‘After Exodus’, Silver reflects on the deconstruction of Uris’s triumphalism. Uris’s passionate, over-reaching, unwavering endorsement of the IDF’S actions in 1948 that gave no hint of understanding or empathy of Palestinian pain became his undoing.

Uris’s excesses created a significant reaction thirty years after the publication of Exodus, when left-wing American Jews wanted to redefine American Jewry’s engagement with Israel’s fundamental principles and policies. As one example, Silver mentions researcher and publisher, Richard Lerner’s, ‘The Pathology of the Occupation’ advocating that Israel should contemplate holding ritual ceremonial bathing ceremonies for reserve IDF soldiers when they return to civilian life, because service in the West Bank necessarily leads Israelis to perform acts that ‘pollute the soul’.

Further in the deconstruction narrative, Silver highlights Israel’s chief of staff, Moshe Dyan’s eulogy at the funeral of an IDF soldier, killed by Palestinian terrorists. Dyan urges Israelis to consider the Arab point of view while maintaining security concerns, “Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of hundreds and thousands of Arabs that live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken.” This sentiment has no part in Uris’s thought.

Silver says that Israelis believe Dyan’s eulogy pointed the way to a future era of mutual political recognition between the two peoples. He highlights the excesses of Uris’s Americanisation has given way to a movement towards efforts by some Israelis and Palestinians to create dialogue, illustrated by PRIME. This fledgling initiative involving Israeli and Palestinian teachers, provides booklets where the Israeli narrative is recorded on one side of the page and the Palestinian on the other.

M.M. Silver’s exposé of Uris’s piece of ‘propaganda’ held my interest to the last page, despite its literary sophistication that required a reread of many sentences. His unearthing of the diversity of Jewish thinking within Israel and the diaspora will appeal to a keen observer of modern Jewish history.